Things happen. Are you prepared?

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Unexpected events happen. Things don’t go as planned. Accidents, faulty equipment, property damage, safety violations, public safety threats, and personnel incidents are just a handful of events that can cause organizations to quickly react. It’s how you handle these unexpected incidents that can determine their severity and your exposure. Incidents – big or small – […]

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Is EA Finally Moving to the CIO Leadership Table?

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CIO 
At the recent Troux Worldwide Conference there was plenty of talk among attendees and speakers about whether EA has a place at the “leadership table”. Some proclaimed that EA was still not seated at the table, while others lamented that EA has a seat at the table but has not yet been invited to actually enjoy the meal.

Troux was listening and decided to host a follow-on, in-depth discussion next Wednesday, May 25th, at the “EA & CIO’s: State of the Union” webinar, 10:00 am CST.

Moderated by Bill Laberis, from CIO Magazine, the webinar features Frank Malta, executive director and chief architect at pharmaceutical powerhouse Merck, and Bill Cason, CTO at Troux. 

Bill Laberis will kick-off the discussion by sharing the latest data from CIO Magazine’s annual “State of the CIO” survey. According to that survey, nearly 70% of CIOs today are focused on developing IT strategies to accelerate business goals. This reinforces the notion that EA has moved beyond the ‘alignment’ phase to the ‘let’s achieve business results’ phase of maturation. This means focusing on business process innovation, fostering agility, and driving transformation throughout the enterprise.

According to a similar survey conducted by Troux, 77% of chief architects and/or head of enterprise architects already have a seat at the CIO leadership table, and 60% of CIOs and/or head of EA are heading an IT Strategy Management Program. Does this mean that EA is fulfilling its promise of bridging the gap between IT and the business?

Frank will then describe how, using Troux, Merck built an “Enterprise Business Capability Model” that provides a detailed visual map of business capability strategically aligned with IT resources. The model uses a five-layer approach to trace business process and capabilities to solutions and technologies and provides a complete view of portfolio investment, technology and associated business cases. With this information, Merck business and IT executives can now discuss about business processes, systems and resources in business terms based on facts, rather than guesswork.

Bill Cason will then talk about the external forces  driving EA toward a more classic Business Technology Management (BTM) approach which addresses the unification of business and IT decision making across the enterprise.

The webinar will also address issues such as moving the lens of EA from a technology focus to a business focus, how to make EA “consumable” and specific techniques for getting to results quickly, a must have for CIOs and their leadership team

The panel will then turn to listener questions. Join the discussion next Wednesday with your own questions. Registration is still open here



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Combining SOA and WCM

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A good friend of mine was in town this week to visit one of his clients.  When we got together for dinner (and, yes, drinks) one of the topics (inevitably) was architecture.  Lately he has been working with some very large international comp…

Holistic Management in a Context of Enterprise IT Management and Organizational Leadership

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An Approach to Sense Making and Intelligent Business There are probably many different ways to gain sense in each of the many different enterprises and organizations across the planet. This particular paper investigates one particular approach question the validity of … Continue reading →

Combining SOA and WCM

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A good friend of mine was in town this week to visit one of his clients.  When we got together for dinner (and, yes, drinks) one of the topics (inevitably) was architecture.  Lately he has been working with some very large international companies re-architecting their public web sites to flexibly deliver localized content.  The solution was to combine Service-Oriented Architecture with Web Content Management.

In a nutshell, the architecture includes a web front end that is composed from portlets where each portlet requests content from WCM system(s) using WSRP.  The front end is de-coupled from the WCM systems via a service bus where the service bus is responsible for routing the content request to the appropriate WCM system.  (I’m using the term “service bus” here in the most generic sense, not to denote a specific product.  My friend prefers the term “service fabric”.)

This has an obvious advantage for localized content.  The service bus routes the request to the correct WCM system based on the chosen local.  This allows each division, country, or geography to manage its own content yet the corporate web presence is still unified.

Another advantage my friend pointed out is that this architecture simplifies previewing of new or modified content.  The service bus can route content requests to a staging WCM system for users that are responsible for reviewing new or modified content.  The new/modified content can be viewed directly in the production web site before being “published”.

It figures that I’d have this conversation *after* writing the ORA User Interaction document (a part of ITSO).  Nonetheless the ORA User Interaction document does cover these topics albeit not this specific usage.  This architecture is a specific example of what is denoted generically as “federation” (e.g. section 4.2.3) in the document.

A Capabilities-based Architecture

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As technology architecture professionals, we can only be successful and valuable to those who pay us if we frame our work in terms of capabilities at the outset. If we start with details, we’ll ultimately fail.

Taking a turn on the BMCanvas

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The basic question I’m exploring visually here is “Is there another perspective to be found using the BMCanvas by Alexander Osterwalder at any orientation?” For the Architect (whatever prefix is used Business/Enterprise/IT) relating to the concept of different orientations may help in focusing the effort on the areas most important to the sponsor. The value […]

A week in Tweets: 01-07 May 2011

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Almost up to date: the previous week’s worth of links and Tweets – sorted into the usual categories, of course.

Enterprise-architecture, business-architecture, business-strategy, business-innovations and other themes at the larger business scope:

practicingEA: Unintended consequences of hyper-connected. Next #entarch challenge: predict these b4 disaster http://tinyurl.com/6zaegec >yes, exactly… strong recommend #itarch #entarch #bizarch #emergence
EABard: 11 Soft Skills For […]